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Category Archives: Bureaucracy

Aka CHiPS: Law and Disorder. If you haven’t been fucking your wife in over a year then somebody else has! Jon Baker (writer/director Dax Shepard) and Frank ‘Ponch’ Poncherello (Michael Peña) have just joined the California Highway Patrol in Los Angeles, but for very different reasons. Baker is a former pro-motorbike rider who’s trying to put his life and marriage to Karen (Kristen Bell aka Mrs Shepard) back together. He’s utterly hopeless at everything else and has to score in the top 10% in citations amongst other criteria just to keep his head above water. Poncherello is a cocky undercover FBI agent who’s investigating a multimillion dollar armoured car heist that may be an inside job. Forced to work together, the inexperienced rookie and hardened veteran begin clashing instead of clicking while trying to nab the bad guys. Baker is phobic and allergic with a history of extraordinary injuries and whose motorsickle skills are literally lifesaving. Ponch is a sex maniac who has a history of shooting at his partners to save thugs. They literally complete each other … In contrast with a lot of quasi-parodic TV show sendups this adaptation of the beloved show actually has a life of its own – deftly utilising the contrasting buddy structure to tackle racism, homophobia, marriage, locker room behaviour and sex in the most outrageously downbeat and self-deprecating way possible which can only be a good thing and it’s relentlessly good-natured even when the junkie son of villainous corrupt cop Ray Kurtz (Vincent D’Onofrio) is being decapitated. Even so, it still revels in sexism but it’s hard to dislike. Peña and Shepard play extremely well off each other and with Mrs S in the cast alongside another Veronica Mars alum (Ryan Hansen) in the large ensemble plus Jane Kaczmarek as a randy Captain and Maya Rudolph (uncredited) as a recruiter there’s a lot of fun to be had. There’s fantastic use of Los Angeles as location and overall it’s an enjoyable if lowbrow entertainment. Shepard can act and write and direct. Triple threat! Good to see Erik Estrada in the concluding scene. Memories are made of this…

Romeo (Adrian Titieni) is a middle-aged doctor in a small Romanian town and father of a teenage daughter Eliza (Maria Victoria Dragus) who needs good results in a written exam to take up her place on a scholarship to Cambridge. He finds out from his mistress Sandra (Malina Malovici) who teaches at Eliza’s school that the girl has been assaulted on a building site at the school entrance where he drops her off every day. She’s narrowly avoided being raped but her wrist is injured and the headmaster wants to stop her taking part in the exam because she could have notes written on it – until Sandra intervenes. Then the police inspector investigating the attack suggests to Romeo that his daughter’s results might be improved if Romeo can find a liver for a corrupt customs inspector Bulai. Romeo discusses the situation with his wife Magda (Lia Bugnar) who doesn’t want him embroiled in the national disease of corruption. When he suggests the plan to Eliza she listens but doesn’t give him any response. Eliza finds out about her father’s mistress and threatens to tell her mother – who already knows. While he tries to pursue her attacker and she attends a lineup in the police station during which one suspect shouts at her through two-way glass, prosecutors turn up at the hospital and start asking questions about Bulai … Cristian Mungiu’s film is mundane in its detail (and its star) but nonetheless compelling as he traces an almost Kafkaesque story of a more or less regular guy dealing with a sequence of horrible events which he has worked so hard to help his young daughter avoid as he has plotted her escape to a more civilised life since she was born. She persists in taking her own path as he can’t even persuade her that her handsome older boyfriend Marius (Rares Andrici) who openly admits to having cheated at his own final exams watched as she was attacked – he got a screenshot from surveillance cameras to prove it. The lack of reaction when he finds out his teenage girl is not a virgin following the attempted rape is a lesson to showier filmmakers. This is an unexpectedly gripping family drama that moves with the relentlessly grinding pace of the ghastly bureaucratic society it depicts.

You’ve got to ask yourself a question. ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk? When a serial killer calling himself Scorpio menaces women in San Francisco cop ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) is assigned to track him down. He’s involved in a cat and mouse chase that sees him racing all over the city in pursuit even dragging a school bus with children into the fray and bringing him into disrepute by questioning suspects’ Escobedo and Miranda rights. This starts by honouring the institution of policing and ends very firmly on a note of critique – with a move by Harry that is replicated by Keanu Reeves in Point Break twenty years later (albeit Harry gets his man). This starts in such an astonishing fashion, with the camera at the killer’s shoulder when he takes aim with a sniper rifle at a woman swimming in a rooftop pool: it sutures you directly into his point of view and makes you question everything you see. There is an undertow of satire (and a string of murders) that secures your sympathy for Harry’s unorthodox approach. The story by Harry Julian Fink and R. M. Fink was vaguely based on the Zodiac killer terrorising young women at the time (and later the subject of another brilliant film) and was rewritten by John Milius and Dean Riesner (and Terrence Malick did an early draft), and the end result is tight as a bullet casing. Milius said it’s obvious which parts of the screenplay were his – because for him Harry is just like the killer but with a police badge. It’s directed in such a muscular way by Don Siegel (who had just made The Beguiled with Eastwood) and characterised so indelibly by Eastwood there is only one word to encapsulate it – iconic. Much imitated (even with four sequels of its own) but never equalled, with a moody empathetic score by Lalo Schifrin. What’s weird is that the killer was played by unknown actor and pacifist Andy Robinson – who replaced war hero Audie Murphy following the star’s death in a plane crash before he signed on the dotted line.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Ken Loach has been a thorn in the side of the establishment since he started working in cinema, and television, for that matter. His films are roars against social injustice and this is in many ways his most successful in many years. Dave Johns is Dan, a widowed carpenter trying to get social welfare benefits when his GP tells him he can’t go back to work after a heart attack. Yet his jobs ‘decision maker’ disagrees because he can walk 50m and raise his arms without dying. He has to go through the kind of hoops – unending online form-filling – calculated to make anyone give up: thus are the unemployment figures massaged/reduced. This is what the director has called the “intentional inefficiency of bureaucracy as a political weapon.” At one such pointless visit to the job centre he observes Katie (Hayley Squires) and her kids, newly arrived from London, being similarly mistreated. They strike up a fast friendship and while their circumstances deteriorate he becomes fond of her and her family but they end up taking strikingly different if equally extreme actions to try to escape total poverty and starvation – there’s a scene in a food bank which is just wrenching. In terms of what actually goes on, their plights are just the tip of the iceberg – one UK acquaintance deemed long-term unemployed after 3 months has to apply for 250 jobs a week (everything from cleaning blood in abattoirs to running the BBC – whatever it takes to shut up these thugs. And all for £80). As Dan says at a ludicrous CV workshop, “what’s the point, you’re getting us to apply for jobs that don’t exist.” His handwritten effort and his personal appeals to potential employers “aren’t good enough” for the bureaucrats tasked with stopping the unemployed having a roof over their heads because there’s no online trail. (And if you don’t know, 40% of the world’s jobs are forecast to disappear by 2032 and I don’t see the population getting smaller – quite the opposite, it’s out of control and on the move north and west. The devastation is just beginning.) This is brutally emotional stuff at the end. Paul Laverty’s script is fantastic and this is unexpectedly funny and heartbreaking.

To those voters who have forgotten the impact of the financial crash and the ongoing fallout from number-crunching instead of manufacturing in the Noughties, this isn’t a bad place to start. TV auteur John Wells’ story of one shipbuilding company which loses sight of its employees and serves the shareholders, downsizing the workforce to pay for a nice shiny new office HQ, serves as a portrait of contemporary masculinity and decency. Ben Affleck is a blue collar guy done good as the best salesman in the east, who can’t make the mortgage payments and keeps his head in the sand because he’s just another asshole with a resume, as his wife informs him. Tommy Lee Jones’ mistress Maria Bello is the company officer charged with naming the names, Craig T. Nelson is Jones’ college roommate who founded the company with him and winds up firing him and old soak and union guy Chris Cooper, who commits suicide because he has to choose between paying his daughter’s college tuition or keeping the house. Affleck’s brother in law, Kevin Costner, has a nice supporting role as the sceptical brother in law whose job offer he eventually takes to build drywall and Affleck observes the sacrifices Costner makes to keep his few employees in work. This is a middle class story of degradation which happens to be set in the US but is a universal story of the destruction of society by greedy entrepreneurs with government assistance. It’s a convincing howl of rage.

You’re a tourist in your own youth. That’s how I felt too, when I sat down in an empty cinema for this – a far cry from the wild reaction that I expressed and experienced when the Godhead of Nineties movies made its debut. Wow! What a rush that was! Twenty years ago. Which is the real shocker. And age is what this is all about – age and betrayal and memory (or nostalgia) and payback. Renton is back – after making away with all that dosh in London. Sickboy – call him Simon now – ain’t too happy and beats him up. He rescues tragic Spud from certain death. Franco’s just had himself stabbed in prison so he can escape and lure his teenage son away from hotel management and into a life of crime … Revenge? Yes, please. There’s tragedy, fun and kickbacks to spare in this blackly comic outing with portions of Porno mixed up with a narrative carved from the original novel and several flashbacks to the old action and new-old footage of the guys as kids. Edinburgh like the rest of the British Isles is now afloat in Eastern European whores, one of whom has her claws into Simon but whom Renton fancies. Then there’s a scheme to set up Simon’s pub as a rival brothel to a chain of ‘saunas’ which invites interest from the proprietor. And in between bizarre music videos – check out Your Dad’s Best Friend by Rubberbandits! – a hilarious excursion picking pockets at a Loyalist club and digressions on George Best at Hibs, the rhythm section of director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge and the superb cast (with the obvious exception of Tommy) is reassembled with a sense of style and a closing of the book, as it were. Spud gets a great storyline and there’s a nod to his precursor when Irvine Welsh turns up as chief car booster. Stick to the day job, dude. And there’s a brilliant payoff with a toilet bowl. Whew, it’s okay then. All is right with the world. Choose this.

Aka Agent 8 3/4.Dirk Bogarde is a louche unpublished London writer who happens to speak Czech so he’s whipped off the dole queue by British Intelligence and winds up hapless in Prague, trying to bring back a coded message he doesn’t understand, not even realising he’s been hired as a spy. This breezy spoof was one of many films riding on the coat-tails of the James Bond phenomenon and the versatile Bogarde is perfect in a role originally intended for Laurence Harvey, in this colourful mix of homage, pastiche, satire and romance, with buckets of tension as he eventually makes a connection in the Gents’ at a glass factory and makes out with the gorgeous Sylvia Koscina (making her English-language debut) who conceals her role for the secret police. There’s great byplay between spymaster Robert Morley and his opposite number, Leo McKern, and some wonderful dressing up as Bogarde tries to get back to London in one piece. Great location photography (in Padua, since the Cold War was ongoing!) by Ernest Steward distinguishes this attractive time piece. Adapted from Lionel Davidson’s The Night of Wenceslas by Lukas Heller. Directed by Ralph Thomas and produced by Betty Box, this was one of the later of their thirty-plus collaborations.

11/22/63. No matter where you stand on whodunnit, this adaptation of N’Oleans DA Jim Garrison and Jim Marrs’s book hits so many targets so precisely you have to just wonder in awe at Oliver Stone’s masterful cinematic achievement. The legal-conspiracy thriller reached new – and mature, true – heights with this exploration of the facts, theories, rumours and lurid stories surrounding the many oversights and strange findings of the Warren Commission. The expedient assassination of the most charismatic American President and the many malcontents who might have ordered it are explored in a series of brilliant character portraits in Stone and Zachary Sklar’s screenplay and performed by a game, talented cast. Garrison is played by Kevin Costner but there are so many great supporting actors – Joe Pesci and his wig are unforgettable as David Ferrie, Walter Matthau is great as Senator Long, Gary Oldman is the patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Kevin Bacon impresses as Willie O’Keeffe. And more. So many more! I don’t know if Stone ever discussed this with Woody Harrelson, whose hitman dad was rumoured to be the shooter on the grassy knoll, and I don’t know if the second fatal shot was shockingly administered in error (maybe) by one of the agents on the car (that’s the most probable scenario, given the ammo burns, IMHO), and frankly it always seemed logical that LBJ ordered the hit, but what do I know?! This packs a visceral punch. And it was 53 years ago today. What a revolting anniversary to have to mark. Politics, American-style, with all those mysterious lone gunmen and Manchurian candidates. Stunning, shocking, what film is for.

Why mess with perfection? It seems a lot of films get out without their makers’ approval – CE3K being but one example. So there goes your auteur theory, box office and schedules being of more concern to the studios. Twenty-two years after it originally escaped Francis Ford Coppola’s hands, he got back with Walter Murch (who’d already spent two years of his life on it…) and re-edited a masterpiece, adding 29 minutes and substantial extra story to this fabular excursion on the wild side of Vietnam. The story is effectively the same, with the brilliance of John Milius’ touch all over this Conrad adaptation and those incredible, quotable lines – I love the smell of napalm in the morning! Charlie don’t surf! – but with added French ex-pats living out the last of their gilded sweaty days on a plantation (Christian Marquand helps). There is also a new sequence meeting the Playboy Bunnies upriver and more with Colonel Kurtz. The original soundtrack is quite possibly the scariest in my collection (try listening to it on your own in the dark) but more music was added: although Carmine Coppola had died in 1991, a deleted Love Theme was found and re-recorded on synths. If you haven’t seen this, or the original, you’re missing out on one of the great cinematic experiences. Stunning.

A mild anthology romcom from screenwriter Nunnally Johnson whose main attraction these days is Marilyn Monroe: she’s one half of a set of couples whose marriages are deemed null and void because Justice of the Peace Victor Moore conducted the ceremonies in the week prior to his appointment being formalised. The segments look at the effect the news has: Ginger Rogers and Fred Allen are the unhappy couple playing happily married for a huge radio audience. Marilyn is Mrs Mississippi and hubby David Wayne is fed up holding the baby so he’s only too glad to stop her disappearing to beauty pageants. Paul Douglas and Eve Arden barely speak to each other. Louis Calhern is too glad to dump gold-digger Zsa Zsa Gabor. And soldier Eddie Bracken (in a play on a role he did for Preston Sturges …) needs to remarry his pregnant bride before he ships out. If you want to see who among them remarries, you had better watch. But the payoff to really enjoy is Marilyn’s.